I have an Epson Stylus Photo R300, with the USB mass-storage feature for picture cards; with the printer connected normally, any picture card inserted in the printer should be recognized by the kernel as a USB mass-storage and mount on the desktop. With the camera this always works, except my USB camera-cable broke, and unfortunately the camera has a proprietary connector, so no replacement is readily available, thus I want to access the XD-card thru the R300. On VL-5.8, the card is not auto-mounting, and I don't know how to get it mounted.

I checked to be sure the printer could be recognized by going to CUPS web-admin, add printer, and CUPS recognized it instantly and selected the preferred printer-driver, so the printer works, USB is OK. Users on other distros (according to a few google results) generally report success with this feature on this printer; could there be some system config needed to sort this out?

Strangely, this has started working, but sporadically. I looked at /dev/, and found /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 coming up when the printer is powered on, and at one point, powering off the printer and power up (with the XD-card inserted in the printer), and the card auto-mounts; it's just not behaving consistently.

Basically, card readers do not signal the OS on card insertion, so the card will be detected only on connection of the USB cable or on power-up of the printer. These 2 threads should help as well as explain what is going on:

It started to become apparent what the drill was, after a little experimentation. One psychological problem causing confusion with these devices, is the printer is no longer just a printer, but a multi-function device, so initial thinking about it brings up the wrong conclusions. After thinking about how it behaves, I realized it is analagous to connecting the camera; the camera is normally off (to save the batteries), so gets turned on only when connected and ready to read, the card reader is detected, etc.

It is interesting that with power on and inserting the cards in the printer/card-reader that the system recognizes the device and creates /dev/sda, but only on a power-on "reset" does the system create both /dev/sda and /dev/sda1 and mount the device; I suspect this is probably consistent behavior for such devices under Linux.